The Business Sensei

Plays Well With Others

Once upon a time, for that is how these stories always begin, there was a brilliant engineer. This brilliant engineer could come up with all sorts of creative ideas in a flash. Because of this, he decided to start a company. His company did reasonably well, although it did have some problems. One of the big problems was that this brilliant engineer, now a brilliant CEO, was not always all that skilled at playing well with others. He always had the best answers to all the technical challenges the company was facing.

Now, to be fair, his answers really were the best, at least according to some standards. On a technical level, he understood the technology of his business extremely well. His solutions were always technically brilliant. And that is where the problem arose.

One day, an engineer in the company was charged with developing a solution to a particularly vexing problem. This engineer went off and studied the problem. He worked hard at the problem. On the appointed day and hour, he presented his solution. Everyone loved the solution except, sadly, for the brilliant CEO. He knew the technology like no one else, and he immediately saw A Better Way. Over the course of the next few minutes, the CEO proceeded to demolish the engineer’s solution. Indeed, he reduced it to metaphorical rubble. If the engineer’s idea had been a village in Eastern Europe, it would have looked like the Great Mongol Horde had just swept through, leaving no stone standing upon another stone nor any blade of grass unplucked.

And then, the brilliant CEO explained how it could have been done better. Truly, it is said by some, that he waxed poetic in his analysis of what to do and how to do it.

There was but one small, one tiny problem: no one understood what he was talking about. Everyone did agree that his solution was clearly better, but, alas, they were simply not sufficiently worthy to understand it. When the CEO had finished speaking, the incomprehension in the room was of such depth that even Nik Wallenda, that master daredevil  who crossed the Grand Canyon on a tightrope, might well have hesitated before attempting to traverse it.

In the end, there was nothing. Rather than a functional idea and a staff of loyal engineers motivated and enthusiastic about carrying it out, the company was left with no plan at all. An imperfect plan, well, that can always be improved. But no plan at all? That can be a bit of a problem.

Sadly, for the brilliant CEO, this was not the first time this sort of thing had happened. Having the Great Mongol Horde sweep across the landscape of ideas, leaving nothing but destruction in its wake, is not something that any company can long survive. In such an environment, it is not long before people stop suggesting ideas lest they draw the attention of that aforementioned Great Mongol Horde. The Board of Directors came to the same conclusion, and decided that it was time for the CEO’s tenure to also come to a conclusion. He was forced out, and the company went on its way without him. Perhaps their ideas were no longer quite so brilliant, but they had ideas. Perhaps their plans were no longer quite so ambitious and clever, but they had plans. Perhaps their products were no longer quite so perfect, but they had products.

From this, we can draw several important lessons:

1. When you crush every plan or idea people propose, eventually they stop proposing ideas or suggesting plans. It is unwise for one person to be left as the sole source of ideas.
2. Tearing people down does not motivate them. Indeed, it does precisely the opposite. If you want to motivate people, find ways to build them up.
3. If it can’t or won’t be built, it doesn’t matter how perfect it is. Insert whatever you’d like for “it.”
4. Having the best mousetrap today is less valuable than having a consistent, repeatable process for developing good solid buildable mousetraps.
5. Point 4 will only happen when you know how to connect with your team and build them up.

In the end, playing well with others might not guarantee that you will live happily ever after, but it helps.

Death of Thousand Knives

Very few companies are ever driven out of business by their competitors.

I’ve found that this statement upsets a great many people, all of whom are quick to jump up and start providing examples of companies that were, in fact, driven out of business by their competitors. This is missing the point. Indeed, it’s rather like a detective in a murder mystery concluding that the cause of death was that the victim’s heart stopped. It matters whether the heart stopped due to lead poisoning, for example in the form of a bullet, or due to some other cause. Indeed, understanding exactly what led to that heart stopping moment is a key part of solving the mystery.

Similarly, while it’s not so unusual for a failing company to have the coup de grace administered by a competitor, how they got to that point makes all the difference. Focusing only on the end point provides a very simple, comfortable solution, but not necessarily a particularly useful one.

Robotic Chromosomes, for example, was a company that dominated a particular niche in the bioinformatics market. They were an early entrant into the field and their products were initially the best on the market.

Over the course of several years, though, they developed a view of their clients as idiots. The fact that their clients were all highly educated research scientists did not enter into the equation. If they had trouble using the software, they were idiots. As a result, the company became increasingly less open to feedback from either their clients or from the market. While their market share was increasing faster than the market itself, they could get away with that attitude. Eventually, though, their growth started lagging the growth in the market. Phrases like “law of large numbers” and “temporary aberration” were batted about. When their market share started shrinking, phrases like, “temporary aberration” became even more popular. The view of the clients as insanely stupid for buying competing products also became more common.

Today, they no longer exist. Were they driven out of business by their competitors? Only in the sense that they put themselves in a position to allow their competitors to drive them out of their dominant position in the market. Sure, their competitors may have pushed them over the cliff, but they were the ones who chose to walk to the edge and lean over.

Now, it may reasonably appear from the preceding description that Robotic Chromosomes was taken down by a clearly defined event, that is, viewing clients as idiots. That is not, however, quite correct. While it may appear that way in retrospect, the reality is that Robotic Chromosomes suffered from a series of cascading errors. Each mistake was small, easily overlooked or ignored. Each mistake led to more mistakes until eventually the company was suffering from so many small cuts that it eventually had no strength left to resist when its competitors moved in. So how does a company avoid this death of a thousand knives?

The obvious answer is that they needed better communications. While true, it again misses the point. Communications is where problems show up, but the communications are rarely the problem. Rather, the dysfunctional communications are the symptom of the problem. It’s critical to look beyond the symptoms to identify the real problem. Otherwise, you spend all your time looking at the wrong things, as Robotic Chromosomes so eloquently demonstrated.

Avoiding that fate requires a willingness to accept negative feedback; it means being willing to hear what people are saying about your product, your service, or your management style. If you aren’t willing to listen, or if you structure the way in which you listen to negate the feedback, you’re setting yourself up for failure, one step at a time. For example, creating a culture that mocks and demeans your clients is not a recipe for success, and closes you off from valuable feedback from those clients.

Being willing to accept feedback is only a first step though. You have to create a context in which employees are not afraid to give you that feedback, and in which they believe that providing feedback is worthwhile. If people that they’ll be punished for being critical or regarded as “not a team player,” it’ll be hard to get them to provide feedback.

Next, you need to clearly define your goals and also define how you’ll know whether you’re succeeding or failing. Robotic Chromosomes had very fluid definitions of success, definitions that shifted regularly to avoid facing unpleasant results. It’s important to separate the evaluation of the feedback you’re getting from the testing to see if the criteria for that evaluation are valid. In fact, verifying the validity of your criteria should be done before you then evaluate your feedback: otherwise, it’s too easy to redefine success and give yourself a few more cuts. None of them seem all that bad at the time.

Step by step, over the course of several years, Robotic Chromosomes successfully created an environment where any negative feedback could be ignored because that feedback was always coming from idiots.  Their competitors didn’t drive them out of business. They drove themselves out of business; their competitors simply put them out of their misery. How will you avoid the death of a thousand knives?

The Blofeld School of Management

Fans of James Bond movies might recall a scene that goes something like this:

We are looking at an unidentified room. Two people we’ve never seen before are standing in front of a desk. We might be able to see the back of the head of the man who sits behind that desk. A voice rings out:

“You have failed SPECTRE. Number 3, why did you not kill 007 as ordered?”

Number 3 stammers out some response and the voice turns its attention on the other person.

“Number 5, you have also failed SPECTRE…”

Eventually, Number 3 is told everything is forgiven and he can leave. Of course, this is SPECTRE. As soon as he walks out of the room he’s dropped into a tank of piranhas, or the bottom of the elevator turns out to be a trap door and Number 3 learns that Maxwell Elevators really are good to the last drop, or he dies in some other Rube Goldbergesque manner.

SPECTRE, as all Bond fans know, is the villainous organization headed by Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the evil genius who spends most of his time trying unsuccessfully to kill 007. Of course, given his track record, as evil geniuses go, he frequently seems more like Wile E. Coyote.

Blofeld’s problem, of course, is that every time one of his agents makes a mistake that agent dies. Those whom James Bond doesn’t kill are terminated by Blofeld himself. This makes it extremely difficult to conduct any form of on-the-job learning. When every mistake is fatal, the lessons tend to come a little too late to do much good. As learning organizations go, SPECTRE has issues.

Although the consequences are generally not so flashy, businesses do face some similar problems. Granted, most business mistakes don’t make for a good action movie, and dropping people in piranha tanks is generally frowned upon. However, there is still the very real problem of figuring out how to enable people to learn from their mistakes without those mistakes harming the business. James Bond, after all, at least gets a script.

Part of the challenge is that even when leaders are well-trained and highly skilled, there is a big difference between what one learns in most management training classes and the actual experience of leading a team, department, division, or company. That doesn’t mean that the training is useless, but it does mean that the training needs to be appropriate.

In sports, for example, athletes drill constantly: they practice the fundamental skills of their sport until they can execute those skills without thought. Doing that, however, is not enough to make an athlete a successful competitor. Such training is necessary, but it’s not sufficient.

As a soccer-playing friend once commented to me, there’s a big difference between the drill and the game. The drill is controlled and predictable; the game is not. The game is confusing and chaotic, and in the moment of truth all those carefully drilled skills simply vanish away. The problem is that chaos is overwhelming: it takes getting used to in order to navigate it. The Japanese term, “randori,” used to describe Judo competition, means “seizing chaos.”

Athletes practice getting used to chaos by moving past drills and practicing in various free play scenarios: mock games, spring training, practice randori, etc. These experiences enable the athlete to experience the chaos in small doses and hence become increasingly comfortable with it. They learn which skills to execute when. The day of the actual tournament, they are ready. When they do make mistakes, they also have something fall back on to improve their skills, as opposed to something to fall into and get eaten.

Business leaders can produce much the same results through the use of predictive scenarios. A predictive scenario is a live-action serious game focused around leadership and negotiation. Like all serious games, it both educates and entertains. Because it is live-action, rather than a computer game, leaders are forced to interact with other people as they would in daily life. Because the game is complex and competitive, participants engage with the game: there is no one right answer. Rather, the situation is chaotic and ambiguous; it’s not possible to predict an optimal solution or a perfect move. Participants are forced to constantly revise and adjust their strategies in order to counter what other players are doing.

Thus, a predictive scenario becomes a powerful practice environment for leaders who want to improve their skills and the skills of their subordinates without risking the financial health of the business. As with athletic training, a mistake is an opportunity to develop new skills or improve existing ones. Surprise outcomes will often indicate someone whose potential is not being developed or recognized: an employee may turn out to be a unexpectedly skilled speaker, be remarkably talented at inspiring and motivating others, display unexpected gifts as a salesman, or reveal themselves to be a masterful problem solver. If that’s not the job they already do, you’ve just been alerted to talent being wasted!

After the game, participants can analyze the action much as an athlete would analyze her performance with her coach. This analysis helps the participant recognize whether problems that arose were the result of a lack of skill or a failure to correctly apply a skill. In either case, you know what to do. There’s no need to guess, no expensive consequences, and no need for piranha tanks.

One of the other advantages of a predictive scenario is that the setting need not be restricted to a pale imitation of the office. Rather, it can be anything imaginable, provided that it forces participants to act as leaders, negotiate with one another, work together, come into conflict, and so forth. You could even be James Bond… or see just how well Mr. Bond would actually do against a Blofeld who knew what he was doing.

Enter the Manager

The story is told of the late martial arts master and movie star, Bruce Lee, that one day he came upon one of his students arriving early at the dojo.

“Why so early?” the master asked.

“I need a good hour to limber up enough to throw high kicks,” replied the student.

“And how long does it take you to prepare for low kicks?” asked Lee.

“Oh, those are easy,” said the student. “A short warm-up, at most, is all I need.”

“Practice your low kicks and forget about the high kicks,” advised Lee.

In response to the student’s shocked expression, Lee added: “Focus on your strengths and they will overcome your weaknesses.”

In making this comment, Lee contradicted a piece of common wisdom in both martial arts and business. Of course, just because something is labeled as “common wisdom” doesn’t mean that it’s wise or accurate; it may just be common. In this case, the persistent belief that the way to success is to focus on weaknesses is a both extremely attractive and subtly destructive.

The idea that if we could just take each person and “fix” each of their weaknesses we would end up with a team of super performers is highly alluring. The problem with this idea is that strengths and weaknesses are sticky: they reflect the complex facets of each individual. Bruce Lee’s student had a body that was not suited to stretching in a certain direction, and no amount of exercise was going to change that. What made Bruce Lee a skilled instructor is that he recognized that one size does not fit all. You must teach the actual person in front of you, not the theoretical person or the ideal person.

The simple reality is that each person has their own unique profile of strengths and weaknesses. A tall man with long legs may find head-high kicks relatively easy, while trying to get low enough to execute a hip throw would be extremely difficult. For the short person, however, the opposite is likely true. In a business environment, each particular profile may not be so obvious, but it exists just the same.

Now, I do get asked if there’s ever a situation in which everyone has the same profile, the same set of strengths and weaknesses. In fact, there is one group where this is true: the clone army in Star Wars. Because they are all identical, with identical profiles of strengths and weaknesses, it might not matter whether one fixes their weaknesses or builds their strengths. That said, their primary weakness, being unable to shoot straight, seems to be unfixable.

Star Wars aside, in the real world we’re dealing with individuals, not clones. No two individuals are identical, which is an important component of building successful teams: a baseball team that was comprised entirely of excellent pitchers and no outfielders would be at a serious disadvantage. Because each person is unique, not everyone will be able to do the same things: when we assume that every weakness can, and should, be fixed, we are implicitly saying that we’re dealing with clones, not individuals. In reality, each member of the team has different strengths, enabling the team to tackle a variety of different problems and develop different, innovative solutions.

You don’t get that by focusing on weakness. Rather, the secret is to build strength and figure out ways to render the weaknesses irrelevant: in other words, get away from the cookie-cutter approach to management and pay attention to the people in front of you. For example, at a certain service company, one sales team had an amazing “opener” combined with an equally amazing “closer.” The first guy was remarkably good at opening conversations with complete strangers and getting them interested, but couldn’t finalize a deal to save his life. His partner, on the other hand, was terrible at making those initial calls, but given an interested prospect, could close almost every deal. Individually, they were mediocre performers, together they were incredible! Rather than try to force to closer to become an opener or the opener to become a closer, their manager let each one develop their strengths and created a situation in which each one’s strengths overcame the weaknesses of the other. The team really was greater than the sum of its parts.

The reason this works is quite simple: people’s strengths and what gives them a real sense of accomplishment and satisfaction for a job well done tend to go together. When it comes to employee engagement and effective goal setting, we know that people engage more deeply and passionately with goals that are personally meaningful and personally rewarding. Attempts to fix weakness generally fail because the person doesn’t find success in that particular area personally rewarding. Focusing on strength, on the other hand, means that you are always encouraging people to build up the things that they most enjoy, and that enjoyment motivates them to constantly work harder. When you “reward” someone by making them do tasks that they don’t find satisfying, you are destroying their motivation: instead of success being associated with a sense of accomplishment and enjoyment, it becomes associated with drudgery. Also, on a purely practical level, a ten percent gain in something that is already strong yields a much larger actual return on the time and energy invested than a ten percent gain on something that is weak.

It’s also worth noting that, as psychologists Gary Locke and Ed Latham point out, the high performance cycle of business is triggered in part by people feeling personal satisfaction and gaining increased self-efficacy from accomplishing challenging goals. This requires, however, that the goal be personally relevant as well. Building and developing strengths are almost always personally relevant goals, whereas goals focusing on weaknesses are generally imposed on someone. This latter, of course, reduces people’s sense of autonomy in the workplace, increasing stress and reducing motivation, thus short-circuiting the high-performance cycle.

Building strength also increases an employee’s feelings of competence, another key element of effective motivation. When people work hard and can see real success, they feel more competent. When you work hard at something and see little gain from that effort, a common result when focusing on weakness, your feelings of competence and self-efficacy are decreased. It’s hard to feel competent when you’re working extremely hard at something at which you simply never do well, and feel little sense of accomplishment in even when you do manage something that isn’t awful.

Another interesting side effect of focusing on strengths versus weaknesses is that people generally feel happier and more energized when they are recognized for doing well at something they are passionate about. When people are constantly being praised for working on weaknesses, the praise feels hollow or pointless. If you simply don’t value the result, doing it well doesn’t feel particularly praiseworthy. On the other hand, praise for excelling at something you love is highly energizing. Granted, it’s important to understand how each employee likes being praised: publically or privately, but that doesn’t change the basic point that praise for excelling at something you love is more valuable than for excelling at something you hate. The former builds feelings of competence, while the latter undermines them.

A team of clones may look like a great hammer, but not every problem is really a nail. A team with a variety of strong performers is capable of shifting and adjusting to meet each challenge in front of them. With practice, the team almost instinctively adjusts to put the right combination of people in the right place at the right time.

It is exactly for this reason that the best managers, like Bruce Lee and other master instructors, focus on developing strengths, not weaknesses.

Of Cats and Unwanted Prizes

I have three cats. Cats being the creatures that they are, I have only to sit down to read a book and instantly there is a cat on my lap. Regardless of which cat it is, a familiar pattern ensues: first, the cat carefully positions itself in front of my book. Once I adjust to move the book, the cat then carefully positions itself on one of my hands. This continues until I give the cat the attention it’s seeking. At that point, it first butts its head against me and then, purring loudly, turns and sticks its behind in my face.

I am sure that there are people who find this end of a cat absolutely fascinating. I’m even quite sure that there are contests in which cats win awards for having the most beautiful behind. For cat breeders and cat fanciers, it can be a big deal to win one of these cat trophies. It is a cause for great celebration.

In an office environment, however, a catastrophe is anything but a cause for celebration.

The worst thing about catastrophes is that they happen about as often as a cat sitting down on top of the book you’re reading. At least, to listen to some managers, it certainly sounds that way. Somehow, every little thing, every small problem, was magnified until it had the aura of impending doom. In short, every setback was becoming a prize for the cat with the most beautiful behind. At one company, the conversation went something like this:

“We’ve found a major bug in the software.”

“We can’t delay the ship.”

“We can’t ship with this bug.”

At that point, the manager started screaming that the product would go out on schedule, or else. When he finally calmed down and I was able to talk with him privately, he told me that he knew that if the company didn’t ship on time, the customers would abandon them and they would go out of business. He was happy to ship non-functional software to avoid that fate.

When he calmed down still further, he agreed to delay the ship.

I am sure that most readers are chuckling to themselves right now. After all, delays in software are legendary. Obviously, this manager was overreacting. True enough; the question is, why? Why would a perfectly sensible, intelligent man react so negatively to something which is, frankly, a common event in the software business?

It turns out that this particular company prided itself on holding to very aggressive schedules. The schedule was so aggressive that they were virtually always running behind. Therein lay the problem.

Time is a funny thing. We react very differently depending on how we perceive it. Being behind schedule all the time had the effect of generating a certain sense of urgency, which was the stated intent of the aggressive schedule. Unfortunately, the urgency generated in this situation was of the slightly breathless, heart-pounding sort similar to what one might experience if being chased by a very large cat of the “has a big mane” variety. A cat which, I might add, is looking to do more than just sit on your book.

The problem with aggressive schedules is that, in fact, being behind schedule can generate the same panicked response in people that they would feel in a situation which actually was dangerous. While in those situations, we’re very good at running away or fighting desperately, but we’re not good at making cool, rational decisions or developing innovative solutions to problems. Each pebble encountered along the road becomes a giant boulder. When we do finally get to the end of the project, rather than feeling a sense of accomplishment and success, there’s more of a sense of relief that at last it’s over. What’s missing is the thrill of victory that energizes people for the next project. That feeling of success is the key to getting, and keeping, people excited and motivated.

In short, instead of the team beating the schedule, the schedule was beating them.

Conversely, when a team is running slightly ahead of schedule, something very different happens. Running ahead of the game means that the team is feeling a constant sense of success. When people feel successful, they work harder, they are more creative, and they look forward to coming into work each day. Teams that are running ahead of schedule are more likely to develop innovative new solutions to problems rather than just slap on band-aids. Feeling that you have the time to stop and think is critical: just think about how easy it is to miss the obvious when you are feeling rushed.

The trick is to view your schedule as a living document. It’s something that you will constantly adjust according to the situation, especially at the beginning of a project. The less you know about potential difficulties down the road, the harder it is to plan: so don’t. Instead, plan to plan. As you move forward, you can revise and project the schedule further and further into the future.

If you find yourself running behind, that’s feedback. Pay attention to what it’s telling you. Is something more complicated than expected? Is someone overwhelmed with a task that turned out to be significantly more time-consuming than you thought? Did something go wrong? Is a vendor habitually late with parts? Is your schedule just plain too aggressive?

If you’re running ahead, that’s also feedback. It might mean that the schedule is too easy and your team isn’t being challenged. Be willing to become more aggressive. It could mean that you need to slow down: are people rushing and cutting corners? At one company, pressure on QA engineers to rush product inspections led to some very expensive and embarrassing recalls and some very irate customers. Moving way ahead of schedule could also mean that your team is working too hard too soon: success is a marathon, not a sprint. Burn out early and you won’t reach the finish line.

Leave the catastrophes to the cats.

Stephen Balzac is an expert on leadership and organizational development. A consultant, author, and professional speaker, he is president of 7 Steps Ahead, an organizational development firm focused on helping businesses get unstuck. Steve is the author of “The McGraw-Hill 36-Hour Course in Organizational Development,” and “Organizational Psychology for Managers.” He is also a contributing author to volume one of “Ethics and Game Design: Teaching Values Through Play.” For more information, or to sign up for Steve’s monthly newsletter, visit www.7stepsahead.com. You can also contact Steve at 978-298-5189 or steve@7stepsahead.com.

The Leader Who Didn’t Play Well With Others

This article was originally published in Computer World.

If a leader doesn’t let anyone else shine, no one will engage

Once upon a time, for that is how these stories always begin, there was a brilliant engineer. He could come up with all sorts of creative ideas in a flash. Because of this, he decided to start a company. His company did reasonably well, although it did have some problems. One of the big problems was that this brilliant engineer, now a brilliant CEO, was not always all that skilled at playing well with others. He always had the best answers to all the technical challenges the company was facing.
Opinion by Stephen Balzac

The leader who didn’t play well with others
Goals are great, except when they’re not
‘Duck and cover’ won’t save your business’ skin
Is the darn thing on?

Now, to be fair, his answers really were the best, at least according to some standards. On a technical level, he understood the technology of his business extremely well. His solutions were always technically brilliant. And that is where the problem arose.

One day, an engineer in the company was charged with developing a solution to a particularly vexing problem. This engineer went off and studied the problem. He worked hard at the problem. On the appointed day and hour, he presented his solution. Everyone loved the solution except, sadly, for the brilliant CEO. He knew the technology like no one else, and he immediately saw A Better Way. The CEO proceeded to demolish the engineer’s solution. Indeed, he reduced it to metaphorical rubble. If the engineer’s idea had been a village in Eastern Europe, it would have looked as if the Golden Horde had just swept through, leaving no stone standing upon another stone nor any blade of grass unplucked.

And then the brilliant CEO explained how it could have been done better. Truly, it is said by some, he waxed poetic in his analysis of what to do and how to do it. And all (or at least all those who understood what he was talking about) agreed his analysis was brilliant.

There was but one tiny problem: When it came time to implement the brilliant CEO’s brilliant idea, there was no enthusiasm, no engagement. None felt they had a stake in the outcome. Not a soul among them dared to make suggestions, even though the most brilliant ideas invariably need modification as they are implemented. The engineer who had been eviscerated by the brilliant CEO never again volunteered to lead a project and never offered another idea for consideration. Others, who had witnessed the evisceration though they had not personally felt its bitter sting, developed a similar attitude.

In the end, the brilliant CEO’s brilliant plan languished. With no one on the implementation team to champion it, the idea remained mostly just that, an idea. The company was left with nothing. Rather than a functional idea and a staff of loyal engineers motivated and enthusiastic about carrying it out, the company was left with no plan at all. An imperfect plan — well, that can always be improved. But no plan at all? That can be a bit of a problem.

Sadly, for the brilliant CEO, this was not the first time this sort of thing had happened. Having the Golden Horde sweep across the landscape of ideas, leaving nothing but destruction in its wake, is not something that any company can long survive. In such an environment, it is not long before people stop suggesting ideas, lest they draw the attention of that aforementioned horde. The board of directors came to the same conclusion and decided that it was time for the CEO’s tenure to also come to a conclusion. He was forced out, and the company went on its way without him. Perhaps their ideas were no longer quite so brilliant, but they had ideas. Perhaps their plans were no longer quite so ambitious and clever, but they had plans. Perhaps their products were no longer quite so perfect, but they had products.

From this, we can draw several important lessons:

1. When you crush every plan or idea people propose, eventually they stop proposing ideas or suggesting plans. It is unwise for one person to be left as the sole source of ideas; just look at Apple after Steve Jobs.

2. Tearing people down does not motivate them. Indeed, it does precisely the opposite. If you want to motivate people, find ways to build them up.

3. If it can’t or won’t be built, it doesn’t matter how perfect it is. Insert whatever you’d like for “it.”

4. Having the best mousetrap today is less valuable than having a consistent, repeatable process for developing good, solid, buildable mousetraps.

5. Point 4 will only happen when you know how to connect with your team and build them up.

In the end, playing well with others might not guarantee that you will live happily ever after, but it helps.

Such a Bargain!

I recently read the claim that, “Each American wastes $300 worth of food every year.” That’s right, three hundred dollars of food is wasted per person per year. The piece went on to offer a variety of products designed to help people eliminate this waste from their lives. Naturally, this is something worth jumping on, right? Well, let’s take a look: $300 per year comes out to 82 cents per day, slightly less on leap years. For a family of four, we’re talking about wasting $2.50 per day. Would it be nice to eliminate that waste? Of course it would; the question is whether or not it’s worthwhile. How much effort is involved in saving $.82 of wasted food per person each day? Just how much food is that anyway? A few grapes? Half a cup of coffee? What is the cost of that effort in terms of time, money, and emotional energy against the returns obtained: $300 in a year, plus whatever sense of feeling good that may result? One fewer cup of coffee each day would save far more than $.86, but is it worth it? Intangibles, such as concentration, motivation, alertness, happiness, and so forth, are difficult to measure, but their lack definitely impacts the bottom line.

One always has to wonder if a savings or a bargain is really as good as it seems. While it’s initially very easy to find major savings in almost anything, as the system becomes steadily more efficient it becomes harder and harder to continue to find cost-effective savings. Thus, requiring employees to not fly first class is an easy way to save quite a bit of money and probably will not significantly impact business. Requiring employees to fly red-eye flights in order to gain minor savings can have a significant impact on productivity, creativity, and decision making. In this situation, only the easily measured aspect of the value gained is being examined: the cost savings on the airline ticket. Why the company is sending the person on the flight, what benefits the company hopes to gain by doing so, and whether those benefits will still be achieved if the employee is sleep-deprived or unable to concentrate during the flight are not being factored in.

Naturally, this is a mindset that manifests in a variety of ways in a business. At one company I worked with, an engineer requested a raise; this employee had a skill set that was very much in demand, and he had discovered that he was being significantly underpaid. The CEO refused on the logic that it would cost the company too much to provide the raise. The person quit, taking a job at a salary considerably higher than what he’d asked for at his original company: he wanted to stay, he just didn’t want to feel taken advantage of. The CEO discovered that it was not so easy to find someone with that skillset, especially at the salary they were willing to pay. They eventually found someone much less experienced and whom they had to pay almost as much as the person who had left. The CEO was actually happy because he hadn’t had to pay a salary for about six months, and then “got a bargain” because the new person was slightly cheaper. The engineering team was furious because they lost the expertise of the person. The cost to the company of not having available the skills and knowledge of the senior engineer is, of course, impossible to calculate. Clearly, however, this person provided some value or he would never have been hired in the first place. It’s worth noting that the company is no longer in business.

Now, the fact is, people love bargains. Most of us love a chance to save some money or make things a little more efficient. The problem is things are often worth what they cost. There’s a reason why a BMW is considerably more expensive than a Saturn or a top notch engineer demands a higher salary than someone less skilled: in the case of the engineer, you expect a far greater return on your investment. It’s not a bargain if it ends up costing you more than you gained. It’s not a savings if the effort involved in saving the money reduces the value of the result by more than the amount saved: saving $.86 on food is going to cost most people at least several dollars a day in effort or lost opportunities.

So how does a company go about figuring out whether or not something really is a bargain? It’s extremely important to ask the right questions:

• What are we trying to accomplish? In other words, what is the actual problem we’re facing?
• What savings are we looking for? What benefits do we think will accrue?
• What is the cost of this solution? Are we looking only at things that are easily measured, such as an expense report or a salary? What intangible factors, such as team productivity, motivation, happiness, increased distraction, etc, might factor in?
• What does success look like? How narrowly or broadly are we defining it?
• What opportunities will this solution cost us? Is there another way?

It’s time to see what your bargains and your savings are costing your company.

This article originally published at Practical Performance Analyst.

How Do You Make Sure You’re in the Right Place at the Right Time?

This article was originally published in Corp! Magazine.

“Slow down.”

I can’t count the number of times that my original sensei would say that to me when I started practicing jujitsu. It drove me nuts. I never felt like I was moving fast. Besides, what was wrong with going fast? Now, after twenty years of jujitsu practice, I’m constantly telling my students to “slow down.”

Speed is a funny thing. It appears to be the most important thing in martial arts: being able to block quickly, hit quickly, throw quickly. However, when you move fast, there’s a tendency to overshoot the target, to over-commit. The block is too wide or the punch is over-extended, leaving you vulnerable. It’s easy to miss obvious feints by an opponent, and walk into a fist. Speed also leaves you physically and emotionally exhausted, unable to actually complete a workout. Indeed, the most skilled practitioners never seem to move all that fast. Rather, they become extremely good at always being in the right place at the right time. Speed comes from precision, but precision does not come from speed.

I’m frequently reminded of this phenomenon when I work with my clients. There is a tendency at many companies to try to do more and more in less and less time. The logic seems to be that if people just worked quickly enough, they would be able to get the job done. Instead, though, the error count is increasing even faster than the productivity. The time spent going back and correcting problems and fixing bugs more than makes up for the time saved by moving faster.

In jujitsu, moving fast can appear to work for a while. Eventually, though, you run into someone who knows what they are doing and you get punched in the nose. In a business, moving fast can also appear to work for a while. The major difference is that when you get punched in the nose, it’s not quite as obvious. It still happens though, and usually when you least expect it.

The problem once again is that moving rapidly does not equate to moving precisely. In a corporate setting, that lack of precision translates to instructions not being read closely, exceptions not being recognized, assumptions not being tested, or flat out inaccurate information not being corrected. It can also mean overreacting to a competitor’s product release or to a news story. In jujitsu, you may not have time to stop and think: if you haven’t prepared and trained, then you may just be out of luck. In a business environment, you may feel that you can’t stop and think, but the reality is far different. Unlike jujitsu, decisions don’t need to be made in fractions of a second. There is time to pause and consider the situation: even in the Apollo 13 disaster, NASA’s Eugene Krantz slowed everyone down and collected information before deciding what to do. Knowing when to slow down is what saved the astronauts; moving too quickly would have only compounded the problems beyond recovery.

Fortunately, most of us will never face the kind of life-or-death scenario that Eugene Krantz had to face. That, in turn, only makes the tendency to move too fast even more inexcusable.

The first problem, of course, is recognizing that you are moving too fast. Just as in jujitsu, it is surprisingly not obvious to the person, or team, that they need to slow down. It helps, therefore, to learn to recognize the symptoms of speed.

One of the easiest ones to spot is when the same types of errors just keep cropping up no matter what you do. You fix them in one place, they appear somewhere else. You come up with procedures for reducing the errors and for each mistake that you remove, a new one takes its place. One health related company demanded such a high throughput of patient claims that they were constantly dealing with forms being rejected because of mistakes. So they put in a layer of checklists to make sure the forms were done correctly. Then a layer of paperwork to make sure the checklists were correct. The errors simply kept shifting and the responses only created a slower and steadily more unwieldy system in which the ability to generate billable hours is limited by the need to do paperwork. The company is now one of the leading exporters of red tape. If they had but slowed down a little, they would have finished considerably more quickly.

Another common symptom of moving too fast is feeling like you’ve spent the day on a treadmill: you’re exhausted but it feels like nothing really got accomplished. Items on the to-do list never seem to go away or items that are crossed off keep coming back a few days or weeks later. When problems that were thought solved keep reappearing, that tells you that you need to slow down and put more time into understanding what’s going and devising more robust solutions. Unfortunately, when you’re feeling rushed, a quick solution feels good and creates a temporary oasis of calm. That feeling can be addicting: at one software company, one department developed the habit of simply marking any bugs that had been around for a while as fixed. They knew that it would sometimes take at least two or three weeks before the bugs could be verified. Maybe they’d go away. Maybe they would no longer be relevant. Maybe there’d be more time later to actually look at them. Sure, they almost always came back, but so what? They bought themselves time to relax, and managed to make themselves look good because their bug count was always low. The actual problems with the product, on the other hand, were never addressed.

If you want to move fast, you first have to learn to move with precision. That means starting slowly and learning how to be in the right place at the right time. Otherwise, you spend all your time and energy rushing about overshooting your target and fixing your mistakes.

Sometimes a Little Inefficiency Can Go a Long Way

This article was originally published in Corp! Magazine.

An efficient system is frequently described as one in which there are no mistakes.

People, however, only learn by making mistakes.

This creates a bit of a problem. In a truly efficient system, there would be no opportunity for people to learn. When there is no learning, the system will eventually fail: either it becomes rigid or it stagnates, but in either case it fails to adapt to changing conditions in the environment.

Shoto Funakoshi, the founder of Shotokan Katate, used to say that in the practice of Shotokan there was no room for error. American students never had the patience for the level of perfection demanded in more traditional Japanese dojos; instead, they made a great many mistakes. Today, Americans win most of the competitions.

Fencing is a very precise sport: a master swordsman can hit a moving quarter with the point of an epee. Yet, the winner of the competition is frequently not the person with the most perfect moves. Instead, the winner is often the person who appears to be making mistakes.

Now, there are certainly situations in which there is no room for mistakes: surgery and landing an airplane are two that come to mind. However, for someone to become a master surgeon or a successful pilot they had to make a lot of mistakes along the way. The goal, of course, is make sure those mistakes occur in settings that do not involve people getting killed. And, although both of them are required to perform potentially difficult operations without error, they are also expected to rapidly recognize and adjust to changing circumstances, for example having both engines of your airplane taken out of action by birds. That ability to adjust can only come from experience in dealing with unexpected or unusual situations: in other words, coping with mistakes without losing your mental balance.

I’ve worked with jujitsu students who completely crumbled when they made a mistake. Their concentration and confidence were shattered and their performance along with them. One minute they’re comfortably demonstrating techniques; the next, they’re frozen or in a panic because something didn’t go as expected. In the business world, I’ve seen CEOs comfortably running their companies, apparently supremely confident, right up until something unexpected happens: revenue misses expectations, there’s an unforeseen problem with the product, a deadline has to be extended, etc. The response is pure panic: in one case, the CEO refused to acknowledge the unexpected problem and insisted on shipping it on schedule anyway… and then couldn’t understand why the customers were so irate. In another situation, the first time revenue came in light, the CEO immediately laid off 20 percent of the company. This was not a particularly well-considered response to the situation. In both of these scenarios, the CEO didn’t stop to think; instead, he took the fact that Something Was Wrong, imagined the most dire of consequences, and took the first action that came to mind.

The problem is that mistakes are not something to fear. They are events that can provide valuable feedback. When something doesn’t work the way you expect, that is often a sign that conditions are not what you expect either. Something has changed or is not what you imagined it was, and it’s critical to understand what that means. Only when you understand exactly what is causing the “mistake” to occur can you design an appropriate solution.

In one company, a researcher was fired because he was clearly making too many mistakes and not committed to his job. How did they know? His experiment wasn’t working. It didn’t work for the next three people either, all of whom quit or were asked to leave. Eventually, it turned out that the experiment couldn’t be performed as designed. The first mistake was made by the person who designed the experiment; the second by management who refused to consider alternative explanations. As a result, they repeatedly executed an inappropriate solution.

When too much focus is placed on being efficient, more and more energy is spent on avoiding mistakes. Eventually, more energy may be spent on avoiding the mistake than on the mistake itself as the company works to solve the wrong problem.

It helps, therefore, to have plan for making use of mistakes and not being frozen by them.

• Start by doing nothing. Take a moment to consider the situation. Look at your own reactions: are you imagining disaster down the road? If you are, try “seeing” that image as a photograph and then imagine crumpling it up and throwing it away. Free yourself to consider alternatives.

• Ask what the mistake is telling you. Consider different ideas. Brainstorm a list of possibilities.

• Look for an opportunity to innovate. Don’t settle for the status quo. Instead of just eliminating the mistake, can you turn it to your advantage? How can you make the system a little, or a lot, better than it was before?

Sometimes, a little inefficiency can go a long way.

Are You Helping Your Business Team to Warm Up?

This article was originally published in Corp! Magazine.

Not so long ago, a friend of mine walked into a meeting moving with all the fluidity and grace of the Tin Woodsman after a rainstorm. He was doing a credible job of moving forward while doing his best to not actually move his legs. As a form of locomotion, I would not have believed it possible if I hadn’t seen it.

“What happened?” I asked.

“I was practicing layups last night, and this morning I couldn’t move.”

A serious amateur basketball player, he had done some serious practice the night before. Unfortunately, he had neglected to warm up: he was in a hurry and felt that he didn’t have time to do a slow warm-up. Instead, he had “warmed up” by doing a number of fast, sharp moves, which ended up straining his lower back and legs. It was no wonder he was having trouble walking. The time he “saved” by not warming up, he paid back with interest over the next several days.

At this point, I suspect many readers are nodding sagely and thinking that only an idiot forgets to warm up before an activity. Unfortunately, they’d be wrong. Very smart people, very knowledgeable people forget to warm up. Furthermore, it’s not just individual athletes who forget to warm up; teams do as well. Moreover, it’s not just athletic teams that occasionally forget. Work teams routinely forget to perform the functional equivalent of warming up; even worse, most of them believe that it’s not necessary. In sports, many an athlete has learned the hard way that no matter how often you can get away without warming up, it only takes one time when you didn’t get away with it to drive home the error of your ways.

Unfortunately, businesses tend to be slower learners, perhaps because the pain is not so obviously connected to the actions taken or not taken. What does it mean for a team to warm up? In sports, the answer is pretty easy. They run, they stretch, they practice the skills of their sport. They might eventually play practice games.

In business, however, it’s less obvious. However, just as athletic warm-ups are based in understanding the activities that the athlete needs to perform, the equivalent behaviors can be deduced for a business team. In sports, an athletic team needs to be able to function as a seamless unit, each member automatically moving to where they need to be. Top basketball players often seem to have an almost uncanny ability to be in the right place at the right time to assist one another.

In a business, it’s critical that a team be able to bring the right person or right combination of people to bear on any given problem. That can only happen if the members of the team are fully knowledgeable about one another’s strengths and weaknesses, are comfortable asking each other for help, and feel safe in admitting that they might need help. The last point is critical: far too often members of a team are seen as less competent or less capable if they ask for help. I’ve been in many companies where the stated attitude was that you were hired to do a job, and if you need help, you don’t belong here. That’s rather like Michael Jordan trying to sink the basket without any help from the rest of his team. If the rest of the team wasn’t backing him up, he wouldn’t be so successful.

Therefore, for a business team to “warm up,” they need to focus on preparing their teamwork skills so that those skills will be there under pressure. That means spending time getting to know one another and developing an appreciation of one another’s skills, interests, accomplishments, perspectives, and working styles. That includes, by the way, skills, interests, and accomplishments that are not obviously work related. Knowing that a coworker is a chess master, for example, tells you something about their ability to concentrate, plan tactics, execute strategy, anticipate problems, and deal with distractions. Knowing that someone is a marathon runner might tell you a great deal about their tenacity and ability to focus. Team members can only truly become comfortable with one another when they know each other as individuals, not as someone hired to do a job.

As paradoxical as it might seem, the secret of a successful team is strong individual connection! Just as top athletes look for ways to assist their teammates, so too must members of business teams practice helping one another. That means getting past the “I can do it myself!” attitude: it may be endearing in a 4 year old, but it’s extremely frustrating in a coworker. No matter how much you can do on your own, you can do more when backed by a strong team. We would have no patience with a basketball player who lost the game because they turned down an assist. Indeed, someone who took an “I can do it all myself” attitude would probably be cut from the team.

Finally, management needs to think about how it’s evaluating the team and its members. Are they being evaluated on individual contribution only? It’s extremely hard to help someone else score if only the scorer gets the credit. It’s hard to accept help if that’s seen as reducing one’s own status on the team. Part of enabling a team to “warm up” its helping skills is removing any obstacles that may be in the way of using those skills. What if the team doesn’t bother to warm up? Will disaster necessarily ensue? Of course not. You might not have any problem at all, nine times out ten. Unfortunately, there is no way of knowing in advance which time is the tenth time.

How are you helping your team warm up?